Self-defeating exercise to extremists

By Abdar Rahman Koya

Since Jan 8, there has been a spate of churches being vandalised, in which at least one was badly damaged. Though these incidents pale in comparision with religious strife elsewhere, such open displays of religious hostility in Malaysia are rare.

Even days before the High Court judgement, debates about the 'Allah' issue showed Muslim groups were split on the issue. Some supported the Christians' 'right' to use 'Allah' as there was nothing in Islam nor in its history that indicated the word was exclusive to Muslims, while others urged Muslims to be wary of the real agenda behind the Catholic leaders' demand.

Still, there were others, such as Umno-backed groups, who never were really keen on Islamic issues in the past and were not the most exemplary Muslims either, going a step further to call for protests at mosques. This saw lukewarm response due to its political party overtones. These groups have largely based their opposition not on Islamic discourses, but on an archaic belief that the move would confuse Malay-speaking Muslims.

Opposition supporters went to town decrying the incidents as Umno-orchestrated and a bid to consolidate Malay-Muslim support. The incidents have only succeeded in turning the issue into one of Muslim intolerance towards the rights of the non-Muslim minority, rather than a dispute which had its origin in scholarly studies about 'Allah'.

Some have even began to preach pluralism to Muslims and draw comparison to the Switzerland's banning of minarets, ignorant of the fact that despite coming out of two centuries of continuous colonisation and Christianisation drives by successive European powers, Muslims' tolerance of Christian minorities, in Muslim countries, has been phenomenal.

Some of the most intensive exchanges and reports over the usage of 'Allah' have been taking place in the news website, Malaysiakini.

“What is really your goal in obdurately pursuing the use of the word `Allah' to refer to the Christian God in a Malay-language newsletter and Bible when so many other names of your Christian God, with even better biblical pedigree, remain available?” asked one reader.

“Ten to 12 million Arab Christians today have been calling God 'Allah' in their Bibles, hymns, poems, writings, and worship for over nineteen centuries. It will be an insult to them when we tell them not to use the word Allah,” wrote another.

'Born-again Muslims' within Umno, who claim that 'Allah' is the sole right of Muslims, and 'born-again liberals' within PAS who support the court judgement, stand at both ends of the debate. For his part, Anwar Ibrahim minced no words in coming out in support of the ruling, saying there was nothing in Islam nor in Muslim history to show that the term 'Allah' was exclusive to Muslims and quoting the stance of several international Muslim scholars.

Some views which oppose the Christians' right to use the word border on narrow political sentiments and Malay racism, threatening to cloud the intellectual arguments put forth by those genuinely critical of the move. It is thus unfortunate that those who question the court ruling are branded as narrow minded and pro-Umno, while those Muslims who genuinely feel that there is nothing wrong in non-Muslims using the term are even asked to re-examine their faith.

No intellectual clout

Nor is the government, who is appealing against the court decision, prepared to argue on an intellectual platform. In any case, Umno does not have any intellectual clout to pose a serious challenge to its critics. When Anwar Ibrahim, whose participation in Mahathir's government saw some inclination towards intellectual discourse, was flushed out of the government, its intellectual pretensions became plain to see.

The 'Allah' saga also saw a surge of interest among non-Muslims to quote the Quran, some out of context, to put their message across that 'Allah' is also theirs. As an Islamic party and with many Muslim scholars in its fold, PAS was sought out to give its opinion. As such, it was a relief for church groups when it said that Christians could use the term.

Non-Muslim groups immediately took this as a fatwa for Muslims, never mind the fact that the issue is less about religion than about the status quo, which had preserved Malaysia's multi-religious harmony, and kept the giant sleeping, so to speak.

Yet, as salivating as it seems to score political points among the once hard-to-get non-Muslim votes, very few of PAS leaders have dared to explicitly state their stance, probably due to fear of being lynched by either faction in the debate.

While many Christian leaders keep insisting on their right to use the word, there are also voices among them who cautioned that its usage would be complicated and counter productive to their missionary activities, pointing out its conflict with the concept of the Trinity. Some even said the use would benefit Muslims as the meaning of the word in Arabic is steeped in the Islamic concept of God (tawhid), rather than any other concepts. As such, it is safe to say that Christians adamant on its usage and Muslims who are fiercely against it may be both engaged in a self-defeating exercise!

Issues being oversimplified

Christian groups allude to the fact that Muslims in Indonesia and East Malaysia (bordering Indonesia's Kalimantan) have no qualms about Christians using the term 'Allah' there. Arguments that usually begin with the cliched phrase “Even the world's most populous Muslim nation...” make the mistake of oversimplifying issues concerning Islam; Muslims, whether in Malaysia or elsewhere never really looked up to Indonesia as a model Islamic society, especially when it is only now rising from the ashes of de-Islamisation and pancasila to reclaim its place in the Muslim world.

Historically, what is now Indonesia and its surrounding regions have largely been under Dutch colonisation, arguably one of the most violence-driven and evangelical colonisers in the 16th and 17th-century. Dutch theological scholars wasted no time in translating the Bible into the local languages, and there are no prizes for guessing why the Arabic word 'Allah' is maintained in Malay-language Bibles, despite the existence of the word 'Tuhan' among a host of other alternatives in Malay. The terminology in these pioneer translations was then used as standard in later translations, including by later local scholars who translated the scriptures either for religious or academic purposes.

Even then, the term 'Allah' never lost its Islamic connotation, although it continued to be used by Christians in Indonesia and East Malaysia. A big number of the Christians in these parts of the region were converts from animism, and did not have a concept of God similar to established religions; there was no provision for that word in the vocabularies, and hence the adaptation of the Arabic 'Allah', which although widely accepted, is fundamentally incorrect from the Biblical point of view.

When it comes to Islam, the Malay language's history is not unique: it too underwent an Islamisation process not unlike Persian, Turkish, Urdu and few languages in the Indian sub-continent. Contrary to the widely-repeated view among supporters of the High Court judgement, the Arab Christians of today actually avoid the word 'Allah' in their Bible, although the word appears naturally in their daily conversations. This however does not mean the word 'Allah' is accepted by the Arab Christians for religious purposes. (As such, Anwar is partly right in saying that the word 'Allah' is not exclusive to Muslims.)

Like Arabic, languages such as Urdu and Persian had a vocabularic reformation after the introduction of Islam among its speakers, thanks to early Muslims' attention to knowledge and literary pursuits in order to understand the new religion better. Urdu Bibles, for example, use the word 'Khoda' although the word 'Allah' is accepted as part of Urdu vocabulary, not unlike the Malay language.

As a result of the Islamisation process, most of the translations of the Quran in these languages leave the word Allah in its Arabic form. But in languages such as English, there have been debates even among Muslim scholars of the Quran as to whether it is proper to use 'Allah' instead of the English word 'God', just as there had been debates among Arab-Christians whether the word 'Allah' is proper for them in its present context.

While the Arab Christians have put their arguments to rest and settled for the word 'Rabb' for the Arabic Bible, the polemics never stopped among English-speaking Muslim scholars, to the point that some even began revising common English translations of the Quran to replace the word 'God' with Allah. The argument is that Allah in Arabic has no match with 'God' in English, as the former has undergone linguistic reform and understood as the only representation of the Islamic concept of tawhid, whereas God in English comes with much of its Christian baggage.

Fast forward more than 300 years later, the zeal in which the centuries-old Dutch evangelism was perpetrated on the Malay Muslim world did not bear its intended results. Over decades, Islam's inbuilt reform mechanism and aversion to colonisation ensured that the religion became synonymous to the people's culture.

Such a marriage between religion and race is an important factor why the Malay Muslims continue to be loyal to their faith, in spite of some of the weaknesses in the way religion is studied and practised. But it also comes with a lot of negative consequences for the growth of Islam. In Malaysia, for example, the misdeeds and weaknesses of the Malays are often attributed to Islam, which is why it has not grown out of the Malay-speaking community in spite of the huge amount of money poured out by successive prime ministers to promote Islam.

Interestingly, the latest controversy is also probably the first time that Christians in the country are showing interest in having a share of the Arab-Islamic legacy of the Malays. The suspicion over their real agenda is also fueled by the fact that it is the Roman Catholics who are insisting on this Arabic-Malay terminology, not any other denominations of Middle Eastern roots.

The tensions could have been avoided had the church opted not to insist on a religious right mired in the politics of history, dragging it into the legal domain. In this case, the zeal of the Catholic groups in taking the matter to court, knowing the sensitivity of the issue, is not only naïve, but not much different than those who went around throwing homemade firebombs at churches.

Whatever the ending of the 'Allah' controversy, Muslim groups in Malaysia have been provided an opportunity to reflect on the range of issues which arose from the explosion of opinions. Whether or not in the end the Christians can use the word 'Allah' – which realistically is impossible even with a court judgement in hand – the political and socio-economic problems faced by Muslims in Malaysia are not going to be over.

The huge social and moral ills among Muslims in the country, which render PAS' raison d'etre a mere utopia at the moment, are warning signs that the Muslims should take stock of their understanding and practice of Islam as merely a set of rituals handed down by tradition.

For a start, the relatively greater intellectual freedom that Malaysia has, as compared to many other Muslim countries in the Arab world, should have been utilised for greater understanding of Islam among Muslims and non-Muslims. The debate, for all its worth, has probably succeeded in exposing the Muslims' failure not only to make others understand Islam, but also to make Muslims understand it beyond fiqh issues.

In the meantime, the perpetrators of the church attacks – of the same minds if not the same people – also vandalised a mosque and a Sikh temple (perhaps due to the latter's symbol which resembles the Arabic script for 'Allah'). Islamic and non-Muslim organisations from all sides of the divides have come out strongly to condemn these attacks. As cruel a joke as it sounds, the perpetrators may have done more in uniting members of all faiths where politicians failed.

Masha Allah!

---------------------------------
ABDAR RAHMAN KOYA, is editor at the Islamic Book Trust based in Petaling Jaya, and was news editor of Harakah's English Section from 1998-2000. He is also correspondent for Canadian-based Islamic political news magazine, Crescent International.